Many folks who are forced to multitask on an ongoing basis already understand that multiple demands on attention can slow you down and carry significant switching costs. An article over at the Atlantic looks at this in detail; you can read it here.

"The effects of mobile phone radiation on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment
where subjects were exposed either to 884 MHz GSM radiation or placebo.
The study finds that compared to placebo, in the radiation-exposed
subjects there was a prolonged latency to reach the first cycle of deep
sleep (stage 3). The amount of stage 4 sleep was also decreased.
Moreover, participants that otherwise have no self-reported symptoms
related to mobile phone use, appear to have more headaches during
actual radiofrequency exposure as compared to sham exposure."

I had the misfortune of working on a Solaris 10 server today that exhibited the most bizarre problem. Despite having Mysql 5.0.45 installed in /usr/local/mysql and explicitly setting --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql PHP configure option, phpinfo() consistently reported that the Mysql Client API version was 4.0.24.

As unlikely as it sounds, the 4.0.24 Client API version was getting pulled in as a result of the --with-openssl PHP configure option. It worked as follows:

In their infinite wisdom, Sun Microsystems decided to ship old versions of open source software and install them in a completely non standard location "/usr/sfw".

The openssl libraries are installed in /usr/sfw along with Mysql 4.0.24.

The PHP Configure script knows about the /usr/sfw directory on Solaris and will look for libraries there.

Once Configure finds the openssl libraries in /usr/sfw it includes /usr/sfw/include and /usr/sfw/lib into the Makefile INCLUDE and LD search paths /BEFORE/ /usr/local/mysql/lib and /usr/local/mysql/include.

As a result, during the make, the linker finds libmysqlclient.so.12 in /usr/sfw/lib instead of /usr/local/msyql/lib.

The solution is to either uninstall the Solaris 4 package or to upgrade it using instructions found here: